Hearing assistance devices are used to assist patient's suffering hearing loss by transmitting amplified sounds to ear canals. In one example, a hearing assistance device, or hearing instrument, is worn in and/or around a patient's ear. Traditional noise suppression or cancellation methods for hearing instruments are designed to reduce the ambient noise based on energy or other statistical criterion such as Wiener filtering. For hearing instruments, this may not be optimal because a hearing impaired (HI) listener is most concerned with noise perception instead of noise power or signal-to-noise ratio. In most noise suppression or cancellation algorithms, there is a tradeoff between noise suppression and speech distortion which is typically based on signal processing metrics instead of perceptual metrics. As a result, existing noise suppression or cancellation algorithms are not optimally designed for HI listeners' perception. Some noise suppression or cancellation algorithms adjust the relevant algorithm parameters based on listeners' feedback. However, they do not explicitly incorporate a perceptual metric into the algorithms.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for improved noise cancellation for hearing assistance devices.